Guardian: “Fears of a worldwide economic slowdown and anxiety about the spread of Ebola reverberated around stock markets Wednesday, driving shares around the world sharply down and pushing the price of oil to a four-year low.”
“After falls in London and New York on Wednesday, Asia extended the selloff in global equities on Thursday as heightened concerns about world economic growth sent Japanese stocks tumbling and U.S. Treasury yields down.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan extended early losses and was down 0.6% while Japan’s Nikkei stock average tumbled 2.2%.
“It’s clear that people are avoiding risks,” said Takatoshi Itoshima, chief portfolio manager at Commons Asset Management. “People started to doubt that the Japanese market may not be able to keep rising only on the recovering US economy.”
The FTSE 100 closed down 181 points or 2.8% at 6,211 on Wednesday, knocking £46bn off the value of Britain’s top companies. This was its lowest level and biggest one-day fall since June last year. It was also close to a 10% decline from its recent peak on 4 September.”
….The catalyst for the renewed market turmoil was data indicating the US economy was being affected by a global fall in demand. US retail sales fell 0.3% in September, the first decline since January, and worse than the 0.1% decline expected, while producer prices fell by 0.1%, the first decline since August 2013.
….As global slowdown fears grew, oil slumped to a new four-year low, down 0.34% at $84.75 a barrel, with Opec unwilling to cut supplies even with demand faltering.
….The flood of cheap money supplied by central banks, notably the US Federal Reserve, which has been propping up the market for a number of years, is beginning to be turned off. The Fed is due to end its monthly bond buying programme at the end of October.
….David Madden, a market analyst at IG, said: “The spike in the Greek 10-year yield and the sudden collapse in the equity markets seems all too familiar, and it looks like we are entering another phase of the eurozone debt crisis.””
Future Today
